Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 820: Split decisions -What matters more?

Sophie walked the east corridor with a mug of coffee she hadn’t drunk yet, still too hot, steam curling off the top of it.

"Morning, Sophie."

"Morning."

A pair of newer Eclipse recruits passed her going the other way, both of them straightening up a little the way people did around her without quite meaning to. She gave them a nod and kept walking.

Further down, someone leaned out of a doorway. "Hey, is it true Kelvin found something last night? People are saying he found something."

"Ask Kelvin," Sophie said, and kept moving before it turned into a conversation she didn’t have the bandwidth for yet.

She passed the training wing and slowed without deciding to.

Through the observation glass, Diana stood in the middle of the floor with the Shoal Shield locked onto her forearm, fragments orbiting slow and steady, and Shade circled her at speed, low passes, wingtip nearly brushing the mats before he banked away again. Diana turned with him, tracking, shield angled to meet him if he came in for real. He didn’t. Just circled. Testing her reaction time, maybe. Or just enjoying himself.

Sophie watched for a minute. Diana’s footwork looked good. Steadier than it had a year ago. Still not what it used to be, not all the way, but nobody watching casually would’ve clocked the difference.

Sophie clocked it anyway. She always did.

She kept walking.

The command center hummed the way it always did this time of morning, half a dozen people at half a dozen stations, screens throwing pale light across the room. She found one of the comm techs, a younger guy named Idris who’d been with the faction maybe eight months and still got faintly nervous whenever she talked to him directly.

"Can you get me Raiju," she said. "Lucy specifically."

"Yeah, give me a second, their relay’s routing through two satellites right now for some reason, I don’t know if that’s normal for them or—"

"Just whenever it connects," Sophie said. "I’ll be right here."

She found a spot near the console and leaned against it, mug in one hand, and drummed her fingers against the edge with the other while Idris worked.

Her eyes moved around the room without settling on anything. The big display at the far wall still had the Eastern Cardinal grid up from last night, the two dead portal sites marked in red, quiet now. A couple of new members she didn’t recognize by name yet, going over gear checks in the corner. Someone’s forgotten mug from yesterday still sitting on a console three feet away, cold coffee ring on the desk under it.

She thought about Noah.

Not on purpose. It just happened, the way it happened most mornings if she gave her mind even a few seconds without a task to occupy it.

A week now. A little more. No word, no location, nothing but the fact that he’d gone after One and told her not to wait up like that was something a person could actually manage not doing.

Loving him wasn’t hard because of anything he did. That was the part people who didn’t know him got wrong when they asked her about it, half-joking, half-fishing, what’s it like dating the strongest man on Earth. It wasn’t hard like that. He was easy to love in the ways that mattered, easy the way water was easy, you just had to let it hold you instead of fighting it.

It was hard because of what he carried. The weight of it. He walked around with the fate of entire timelines stacked on his shoulders half the time and made jokes anyway, made space for everyone else’s problems anyway, and she’d learned a long time ago that loving someone like that meant you signed up to carry a piece of it too, whether you wanted to or not.

She didn’t resent it. She’d chosen it. Chose it every day, actually, every time he disappeared for a week or a month or two years and she stayed exactly where she was, doing the work in front of her, trusting he’d come back because he always had.

Trust didn’t make the waiting quiet, though. It just made it bearable.

"Connecting now," Idris said.

Sophie straightened, set the coffee down, and put her headset on.

The screen flickered and Lucy’s face filled it, Raiju blue and overcast behind her same as always.

"Sophie." Lucy’s mouth curved, not quite a full smile but close to one. "This is early for you."

"Not that early."

"For you it’s early." Lucy tilted her head slightly. "What’s going on?"

"Can’t I just call to say hi?"

"You could," Lucy said. "You don’t, though. Not this time of morning, not with that face."

Sophie huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh. "Fair."

"So." Lucy leaned back a little. "Something with Lucas? Did you find something?"

"No." Sophie’s shoulders dropped half an inch, and she let out a breath before she kept going. "No, nothing on that front yet, I wish I was calling with better news than what I’ve got."

"Okay." Lucy’s face didn’t change much, just settled into something more careful. "So what is it."

Sophie hesitated. Not because she didn’t know how to say it. Because saying it made it fully real in a way it hadn’t quite been yet, even after the debrief, even after watching everyone’s face in that room last night.

"We hit two Purge sites yesterday," she said. "Eastern Cardinal. Warehouses, portal tech, moving cargo. Kelvin got into one of the portals before we shut it down."

"And."

"And he traced it." Sophie made herself say it plainly instead of walking around it any further. "It leads to a planet. Arthur’s planet."

The line was quiet for a second.

"He’s alive," Lucy said. Flat. Not a question, the way she said most things that weren’t questions.

"He’s alive."

Lucy’s jaw tightened, just barely, the kind of thing you’d miss if you hadn’t known her a long time. "After everything. After what he did to my parents, what he almost did, years of my father barely functioning some winters because of what that man left behind, and he’s just—" She stopped herself. Started again, quieter. "He’s alive."

"Lucy—"

"I need a second."

Sophie gave her one. Didn’t fill the silence, didn’t reach for anything to say. She’d learned that much, at least, from years of watching people process things that didn’t have a clean shape to them.

Lucy’s eyes moved off screen for a moment, somewhere past the camera, and when she looked back something in her face had shifted, not softened exactly, but sharpened into something that looked almost like relief wearing anger’s clothes.

"Wait," Lucy said. "Wait, no, this is— Sophie, this could actually be good."

"Lucy—"

"No, listen, if he’s alive, and One learned whatever he did to Lucas from somewhere, copied it, stacked it, whatever he does—" Lucy was talking faster now, leaning into the screen. "Then the man who taught him that trick is sitting right there. On a planet. That we can find."

"I thought about that."

"So there’s a chance. An actual chance, not us hoping something turns up eventually, an actual place to go and someone to make answer for it."

"I thought about that too," Sophie said again, softer. "Believe me, that’s the first place my head went."

"So we go." Lucy said it like it was already decided, like the conversation had already ended somewhere Sophie hadn’t caught up to yet.

"Lucy, hold on—"

"What."

Sophie rubbed at her temple with two fingers. "I want to. I do. I’ve wanted a reason to go after that man since the day he did what he did to Lucas, you know that."

"But."

"But we don’t have the numbers for it right now, not the way we’d need." Sophie kept her voice even, gentle, the way you talked around something sharp instead of straight at it. "Noah’s gone, we don’t know where, he’s been off-grid a week chasing One. Lucas is in cryo, that’s an Alpha we don’t have access to. Diana’s still not fully back, three years and she’s close but she’s not all the way there, I’m not sending her into Arthur’s own ground half recovered. Kelvin needs to stay here, in case the Purge tries something else while we’re distracted, and because if your route comes back empty, whatever he’s working on with Lucas might end up being the only thing that actually saves him."

"So who does that leave."

"Me. Sera. Angel." Sophie let that sit. "That’s what we’d have. Against the man who built One. Who we didn’t even beat last time, if we’re being honest about it, One’s the reason that fight ended how it did, not us."

Lucy didn’t say anything for a moment.

"So we wait," she said finally.

"I’m not saying wait forever," Sophie said.

"You’re saying not now."

"I’m saying not spread thin." Sophie shook her head, even though Lucy couldn’t see it do much through the screen. "And I don’t mean that as a knock on the three of us, Lucy, I’m not sitting here thinking Sera or Angel or I aren’t enough, that’s not it at all."

"Then what is it."

"Your people. Raiju’s forces, on their own, that’s more than enough to make Arthur’s life difficult, I know that, you know that." Sophie pressed her palm flat against the console. "But nobody’s ever been on that planet. Nobody knows what’s actually waiting there with him. Numbers help. Numbers don’t fix not knowing."

"So we wait until what? Lucas can’t wait again? Is that it, Sophie?" Lucy asked.

"I’m saying we don’t walk in blind and call it brave. There’s a difference,"

"Is there." Lucy’s voice had gone flat again, that particular flatness that Sophie had learned over the years meant Lucy was holding something back rather than not feeling it. "Because from where I’m sitting it sounds like you’ve got a faction to run and a boyfriend to worry about and a hundred other things pulling at you, and somewhere in all of that, Lucas ends up last."

"That’s not—" Sophie’s voice caught. "Lucy, that’s not what this is."

"Isn’t it."

"No. God, no. I’ve thought about nothing else since Kelvin put that planet on the screen, I promise you that."

"I’m not asking you to send anyone," Lucy said. "Raiju can put people together. We’ve handled ourselves before."

"That’s not what I’m worried about and you know it."

"I know you have your reasons," Lucy said, and there was nothing raised in her voice at all now, which was somehow worse than if she’d shouted. "They’re good reasons. I’m not disputing the math."

"Then why does this feel like you’re mad at me."

Lucy was quiet for a second too long.

"I’m not mad at you," she said. "I’m mad that he’s alive. I’m mad that Lucas is in a box and might not wake up and the man responsible for even part of that gets to keep breathing on some planet we can’t reach without perfect conditions." She exhaled slowly. "That’s not you. I know it’s not you."

"Okay."

"I’ll keep you posted," Lucy said, already reaching for something off screen, the conversation closing the way it always did when she’d said as much as she meant to say and decided the rest wasn’t worth spending.

"Lucy—"

The screen went dark.

Sophie sat there with her headset still on, the command center humming on around her, her coffee gone cold on the console beside her hand.

___

Sophie dragged herself down two flights of stairs instead of taking the lift, mostly because she needed the extra thirty seconds before she had to be a person who talked to anyone else.

She found Kelvin exactly where she expected, buried in his lab with three screens up and a half-eaten protein bar sitting forgotten next to a mess of cellular scan data.

"—and that’s the whole problem, right, the regeneration pathway works fine in isolation, my simulations are clean, but the second I try to scale it to something the size of an actual human circulatory system it just falls apart, and I need Webb’s materials data, specifically the bonding agent he used on the prototype casing, because without that I’m basically guessing at tolerances, and guessing at tolerances when the thing I’m trying to save is Lucas’s entire nervous system is not a place I want to be operating from, I need him to get back to me like yesterday, not next week, yesterday—"

"Uh-huh," Sophie said, dropping into the chair across from him.

"—because if the casing can’t hold the regeneration serum stable past the six hour mark then the whole delivery method is dead in the water and I have to start from a completely different approach, which, fine, I can do that, I’ve done that before, but it costs us time we don’t exactly have a lot of—"

"Uh-huh."

Kelvin stopped mid-sentence and looked at her properly for the first time since she’d walked in.

He laughed, short and a little tired around the edges.

"It’s like old times," he said. "You sitting there nodding along while I lose my mind about something you have zero context for."

"I have some context."

"You have the vibes of context." He leaned back in his chair. "This is very reminiscent, is what I’m saying. Two years, Noah gone, and it was you and Diana and Sera just absorbing whatever insane thing I was working through that week like it was your job."

"It kind of was our job."

"Nobody assigned you that job."

"Somebody had to hear it," Sophie said. "Otherwise you’d have just been yelling at empty rooms."

"I do that too, for the record. Empty rooms get plenty of me." He gestured vaguely at the screens. "But yeah. You’re right. It was a whole thing. You especially, actually, you took the brunt of it, I remember you sitting exactly where you’re sitting now at like two in the morning listening to me theorize about void stone lattice structures while looking like you hadn’t slept in a week."

"I hadn’t."

"No, you hadn’t." Something in his face softened. "None of us had."

Sophie looked at the mess of screens behind him. The scan data, the half-built simulations, the stubborn shape of a problem he hadn’t solved yet but clearly wasn’t going to stop chewing on until he did.

"Hey," she said. "Your ideas are incredible, you know that. We’d be lost without you, actually lost, not being dramatic about it. You built this entire station underwater basically by yourself. You’re keeping Lucas alive right now with nothing but stubbornness and spreadsheets. You’re a genius, Kelvin. Our genius."

He blinked, caught off guard by the sincerity of it landing in the middle of his rambling.

"Well," he said, rubbing the back of his neck. "I mean. I try."

"You do more than try."

"Okay, I try really hard, is that better?"

She almost smiled. Almost.

He caught it, the almost, the way it didn’t quite finish.

"Hey." His voice dropped some of its usual speed. "You don’t look okay. What’s going on."

Sophie let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding onto.

"I called Lucy this morning," she said. "Told her about Arthur."

"Ah." Kelvin set the protein bar down, giving up on it entirely now. "How’d that go."

"Bad." Sophie rubbed at her eyes. "Not bad like she yelled at me, she didn’t, it was worse than that, it was quiet-bad. She wants to go after him. Immediately. And I had to be the one to tell her we can’t send what she’d need us to send, not right now, not with everyone we’ve got scattered or hurt or busy, and she heard that as—" Sophie stopped. Started again. "She heard it as me not caring enough. Like Lucas isn’t as important to me as he is to her because he’s Grey and I’m Eclipse and somehow that means something."

"That’s rough," Kelvin said.

"Yeah."

"For the record, though. Eclipse, Grey, none of that actually means anything, it’s just names on paper, organizational stuff, doesn’t change who loves who or how much." He said it plainly, no ramp-up, no tangent, which somehow made it land harder than if he’d dressed it up. "Lucas matters to us the exact same amount he matters to her. You know that. I know you know that."

"I know."

"But she’s in her feelings right now, and grief makes people look for somewhere to put the anger, and you were the nearest target because you were the one on the phone." He shrugged. "Doesn’t make it fair. Doesn’t mean you did anything wrong either."

Sophie’s throat tightened, unexpectedly, the way it sometimes did when someone said the true thing out loud instead of letting her keep circling it in her own head.

"I just wanted her to hear that I want this too," she said. "That I’m not sitting on my hands because I’ve got a faction to run."

"She’ll hear it eventually. She’s not stupid, she’s just hurting." Kelvin stood, came around the desk, and before she could brace for it he’d pulled her up out of the chair into a hug, arms wrapping around her without any of his usual chaos behind it.

"You’re doing everything right," he said, quieter than she’d heard him all week. "Even when it doesn’t feel like it."

Sophie let herself lean into it for a second, just a second, before pulling back and wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hand.

"Thanks," she said.

"Anytime." He stepped back, already reaching for his tablet again, some of the usual restlessness creeping back into him. "Now go get some actual sleep, or at least pretend to, because I need you sharp for whatever comes out of this Arthur thing, and you look like you’re running on spite and old coffee."

"That’s exactly what I’m running on."

"Figured." He smiled, small and real. "Go. I’ve got Webb to harass."